Huidobro
In Chile there are only two directions: North and South.
One bird: the condor. Huidobro invented the Andes.
Savannah
The name is a song. Home of Johnny Mercer and Flannery O'Connor. Antebellum
still. In Savannah there is no such thing as a "rush hour."
Rattler
There is a type of man who must rattle and read The Times on the beach. That man is
my enemy.
Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)
The fact that he liked to photograph littler girls in the buff did not banish him from
the best households in England. That happy isle. Where eccentricity is still expected and respected.
Martial
No poet is so identified with his genre. To this day Martial and epigram are
synonymous . In a sense they invented each other. Too one-dimensional? Perhaps.
But what a welter of life laid bare by that scalpel.
Patrice Cobb-Cooper
The dowager empress of the Irish Society of Boca Raton dominated all with her
loud, insolent, rasping voice. Always larger than life and in control. When one of her
wealthy husbands died in Ireland laughing and his grown up "children" objected to
burying him in Europe, she shipped him home to them in Chicago C.O.D. Her quiet,
self-effacing demise left stuffy Boca greatly diminished.
Lizbeth Scott
I was too young to appreciate the movie star's smoky, sultry style. When asked to
obtain her signature for a Chesterfield advertising poster over at the Plaza by my
ad agency, I declined because it was getting late and I was in a hurry to get home.
To the Bronx!
Edward G. Robinson
Dynamic and explosive in whatever role he undertook. I'd give anything to know
what he whispered into Lauren Bacall's ear in Key Largo. From her shocked,
outraged reaction I'm sure of one thing: it was not in the script.
Bogart
His edgy. high-voltage performance in The Maltese Falcon has probably never been
equaled. A peculiar electrical intensity conveyed through his glistening eyes.
Jack Palance
The snakelike, sexually suggestive way he slides off a horse in Shane is one of the
unforgetable moments in film, wryly counterpointed by Ladd's "He ain't no
cowpoke."
Hitchcock
Knew a lot about the hidden, excremental character of murder. Watch, for example,
the raising of the mud-caked submerged death car in Psycho.
Benny Hill
Despite an obvious debt to Red Skelton, one of our most original comics. The
danse macabre striptease sequence in which he even divests himself of his skeleton
is a surrealistic masterpiece.
Lee Marvin
The voice alone was worth the price of admission.
Retirement
Better to die in harness than to amble off to the glue factory simply because you
have nothing better to do. Most of us need the routine of work if only to appreciate
leisure.
Carnival
"But everything is sexual," the Brazilian poet exclaimed, wiping the sweat rolling down his brown
flabby face, his black eyes bulging behind thick glasses like some incredible nocturnal insect.
William Carlos Williams
Our Theocritus of smoke stacks. inventor of the Industrial Idyll, Poetry depicting
those wretched stretches of weeds, broken glass strewn backyards, clapboard houses,
dumps, moribund hospitals. abandoned factories, warehouses, etc. All the detritus of
the broken, toxic, disconnected waste lands of north Jersey.
Jimmy Doolittle
His daring carrier raid on Tokyo inflicted negligible military damage, but the
damage to Japanese pride precipitated the pivotal battle of Midway. In war as in
everything else the full impact of events is not always immediately apparent.
Deanna Durbin
While still in uniform I had the privilege of escorting the beautiful famous singer to
the Monte Carlo Ballet in Monaco. Why she selected an anonymous American sailor
to accompany her, I'll never know. We were given choice seats.
Virgil
That pious prick. Aeneas. Always on duty.
W. C. Fields
His consummate inablity to get himself unglued probably had its origin in the
sticky, gluon nature of his native Philadelphia.
Baseball
Complex as chess. The essence of concentration and confrontation. A game of
vectors and velocities.
Flying Down to Rio
An aerial delight, The bare-breasted show girls riding the wings of biplanes doing
acrobatics over Rio is a wonderful futuristic fusion of sexual/mechanical energy.
Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen)
Located outside Madrid in high, cool, pine-scented air: Franco's mountain
monument dedicated to the dead of the Spanish Civil War. More like the Holland
Tunnel than a tomb or church. Still less a cathedral. Eternally leaking . . . or is it the
tears of those stone Angels dressed as aviators?
Jimmy Stewart
He never played the bad guy. That was not to his credit,
c
Whether looking at the stars or each other, all we can perceive is the past whether in
light years or nano-seconds. In a real sense once we accept the speed of light as an
absolute, only the past exists,
Richard Feynman
The Peter Pan of quantum physics never lost touch with the element of play central
to his remarkable work.
Mnemosyne
Mother of the Muses. Apparently it is the idiosyncratic constructs of memory that
best define us as a species. Memory is not a given or a result but a unique artifact
made in the here and now.
MacArthur
My father never forgave him for firing on the WW I bonus marchers in Washington.
He never seemed to miss a photo opportunity. How many times have we seen it—the
picture of MacArthur wading ashore, getting his pressed pants wet "returning". Or as
I heard a bitter Marine say, "Yes, MacArthur took the Philippines/ with the help of
God and a few Marines."
Manuel Bandeira
When I met the great patriarch of modern Brazilian poetry in his apartment near the
Santos Dumont Airport, I thought he resembled a small carved mahogany idol from
the Amazon jungle. He totally surprised me by reciting my "Breakfast with a
Cannibal" poem in flawless English.
Franz K.
Our Ovid of the quotidian. Gregor, after being turned into an insect, still tries to go
to work. Much like those old Wolf Man movies in which Lon Chaney Jr. dressed in
a clean white shirt and tie and determined to be ordinary, mournfully notices tufts of
hair erupting on his hands.
Patrick McGoohan
Too bad we didn't award him a retro Oscar for his remarkable work in the Secret Agent television series back in the 60s. Photographed against the bleak chiaroscuro of cold war Europe, his blend of good looks, technical know how and icy intelligence made him the perfectly believable Secret Agent.
JFK
When I first saw him and Jackie at the National Art Gallery he was still the junior
senator from Massachusetts—taller and leaner than I expected—pointedly ignored
by the Washington crowd. I turned to Pierre Emmanuel and said, "He'll be president."
"He'll never get elected with a wife like ," Pierre dryly replied, implying that America
would never accept a chic First Lady.
Wilde in the Wild West
What a wild madcap merry musical it would make— Oscar Wilde entertaining gold
miners in Colorado during the time of Jesse James.
The Pencil
Still the primary tool of philosophers and poets. Hard to find one these days. I
remember when they used to be pedaled on large trays by blind beggars in the
subway. Of course you were not supposed to ever buy one.
The Thimble
Encapsulates the female mystique: smooth, ovaled, sieved, steel.
John Bell
His Theorem suggests that we inhabit a ghostly quantum cosmos where everything
is magically interconnected and affected by everything else in unimaginable ways.
A possibility: instantaneous telepathy under the imprimatur of Pa Bell.
Einstein
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle did not sit well with his post-Newtonian
postulates. Contrary to his own earlier quantum discoveries, he refused to accept the
idea of a chancy, wild card universe. God does not play dice! You can almost hear
him. From the stars.
Elizabeth Bishop
We spent an afternoon in her patron's lavish mountain mansion in Petropolis
discussing Robert Lowell's poetry. I remember complaining about Lowell's harping
on being a Lowell in Life Studies and her prim reply, "Well, after all he is a Lowell."
Jack Benny
Probably our finest, most sophisticated comedian: the ultimate straight man. Master
of the serial joke and minimalist humor.
Othello
How quickly his Venetian veneer wears off! He speaks and behaves like an Oriental
potentate. Like Mohammed. he suffers from epilepsy. By Islamic law the punishment
for adultery is death. Othello is an infidel.
Hamlet & Hamburger
Orson Welles observed that in Hamlet Shakespeare tried to write a tragedy about a
genius and that he never made that mistake again. I once asked a writing class to
imagine how Hamlet would order a hamburger. One student wrote a dissertation.
Portia
The quality of mercy? Butter wouldn't melt in her cunt.
Hiroshima
More horrific than those grotesque lifelike plaster cast moulds of Pompeii's
suffocated victims: the shadows of the living imprinted on a wall remnant by the
blinding, incinerating flash of the A-bomb.
November 22, 1963
We had just finished discussing Crime and Punishment when I noticed a commotion
outside the classroom building. People were running in different directions across
the campus. I looked out the ground-floor window toward the women's dormitory
where something caught my eye. From one of the windows hung a white towel,
printed in large letters in bright lipstick KENNEDY DEAD.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
A crucial figure in the full sene of the word. A free thinking poet and brilliant physicist,
he embodied all the contradictions of the age. Probably the only scientist at Los Alamos
who fully grasped the momentous nature of what they euphemistically called 'the gadget."
RICHARD O'CONNELL lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Margie, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist, Light, etc. His most recent collections are Dawn Crossing and Waiting for the Terrorists. Home address: 1147 Hillsboro Mile, #510, Hillsboro Beach, Florida, 33062. Telephone: 954-426-8906. (Email: rocon100@comcast.net)
